Who Is.... Trevor Norris
My first encounter from the ToC took place at BWI airport. As my wife,
Kim, and I prepared to catch our separate flights to LAX, I noticed a vaguely
familiar person sitting in the waiting area. Kim and I debated for a few
minutes whether we knew this young woman or not, and since I hate
uncertainty, I bit the bullet. When Kim rushed off to catch her flight, I sidled up to the subject in question and asked, "Are you Jill?" After introducing
myself and establishing that I wasn't a stalker, Jill Bunzendahl Chimka
and I had the loveliest chat while waiting for our flight. It was really
great to establish that connection with the other DC contestant early on, I
think Kim and I will enjoy seeing JBC and her husband Cory around town.
Upon arriving at LAX and reuniting with my wife, we went and picked up our LA-mobile. You gotta love the uninhibited cheese factor of tooling around Southern CA in a drop-top Mustang with an automatic transmission. What fun!
We established a base of operations in the shrine to Merv, and ventured
out into the gorgeous Beverly Hills evening. We ran into Andie MacDowell and I thought that Kim was going to rip my arm off from excitement. After that, I was worried about whomever had to sit next to Kim during my ToC games. If Andie MacDowell sightings elicited violent reactions, what would happen if I got a bad Final Jeopardy category?
Walking into the lobby of the Beverly Hilton on Tuesday morning, I knew
what pitchers must have felt walking to the mound at Yankee Stadium back in '27 to face "Murderers' Row." Instead of Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, Lazzeri, and Combs, the modern day version included Bailey, Levaren, Brown, Floyd, Cassity, McCune, and others too fearsome to name. My mind was a blank slate as we boarded the bus and headed to Sony Pictures Studio.
After returning to the Green Room, the buildup to the actual games is
mostly a blur. I remember people coming and going for interviews with the media and with the production staff. There were cameras in the Green Room, and I did my dead best to avoid them. Someone finally ushered them out, along with the first three contestants, and mercifully put a movie in the DVD player. I'd seen "About a Boy" a few weeks earlier, so I grabbed a section of the newspaper and watched Mark Brown dive into his study materials. I was secretly wanting to see what he was studying so intently, and hoping not to run into him in the first round
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